Hosted monthly by the UC Berkeley Natural History Museums

This cafe is an informal forum for discussing interesting and relevant scientific issues. The goal is to encourage public engagement with science by inviting members of the scientific community to present topics for a casual evening of conversation. Cafes may vary in length and format depending upon the speaker and the topic. Audience questions are encouraged both during and after!

This Month’s Cafe

Description of the talk: Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a global scale magnetic field. However, it does have intense and localized crustal magnetic fields. Earth’s planet-wide magnetic field is thought to shield our atmosphere from the solar wind. Without such a shield, the solar wind has impacted the atmosphere of Mars over the past few billion years, substantially changing it. Dr. Fillingim will discuss some of the recent ideas about the history of Mars’ magnetic field and how (and why) the atmosphere and climate of Mars has changed. He will also introduce the next mission to Mars, MAVEN, which launched last November, which is designed to decipher the atmospheric history of Mars.

MAVEN Illustration (courtesy NASA/GSFC)

Dr. Fillingim’s Bio: Matt Fillingim has been a research scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2002. Prior to that, he received his Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Washington in Seattle and both his B.S. and M.S. in Space Sciences from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FL. His current research focuses on the magnetic fields and tenuous, ionized gas (aka plasma) surrounding Earth, the Moon, and Mars. He has also been the astronomy instructor at Berkeley City College since 2008.